The effect of the survival outcomes of the neo-adjuvant chemotherapy on the advanced epithelial ovarian cancer.

Objective: Neo-adjuvant chemotherapy (NACT) is widely used for progressive epithelial ovarian cancer. Despite conflicting evidence on its efficacy compared to primary debulking surgery (PDS), our study assesses NACT's survival outcomes in a real-world setting. Methods: We retrospectively analyzed 41 patients with advanced epithelial ovarian cancer undergoing non-optimal PDS or interval debulking surgery (IDS) at Korea University Anam Hospital. Progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) were compared between PDS and IDS groups using Kaplan-Meier analysis. Results: Forty-one patients with advanced epithelial ovarian cancer underwent non-optimal PDS or IDS at Korea University Anam Hospital. Twenty patients underwent non-optimal PDS and 21 underwent IDS. Patients' characteristics such as diagnostic age, initial CA-125, body mass index, histologic type, etc were not significantly different between 2 groups. In terms of residual tumor sites, 60% of the PDS group had residual tumors in both upper and lower abdomens, and 47.6% of IDS group had tumors in upper abdomen. Paclitaxel-carboplatin with bevacizumab was used in a significantly more proportion in PDS group compared to IDS group (80 % vs. 38.1%, p=0.017). There was no significant difference in PFS between PDS and IDS group (median=17.1 months vs. 18.7 months; p=0.871). There also was no difference in OS between two groups (median=47.4 months vs. 45.6 months; p=0.235). Conclusion: NACT effectively reduces tumor burden, and survival outcomes are comparable to PDS even in patients with nonoptimal surgical outcomes. IDS is recommended for patients unable to undergo optimal PDS due to advanced epithelial ovarian cancer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]